


Beginning

by deathwailart



Category: Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Genre: Backstory, Beginnings, Family, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-25
Updated: 2012-07-25
Packaged: 2017-11-10 17:45:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 777
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/468985
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deathwailart/pseuds/deathwailart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>30 days of writing challenge: beginning</p>
            </blockquote>





	Beginning

Bone-breaker they will call her.  Ice-veins, Snow-hammer, Stormblade, the Stormcloak champion.  Dragonborn or Dovahkiin, they will call her that too.  Thane of the nine holds of Skyrim, Champion of the Daedra, Harbinger of the Companions, Listener of the Dark Brotherhood, all those names and more to the point where maybe even she will forget her real name, forget that she even has one at all.  But that's not how she starts her life, how she starts this adventure.  Before all that she was just a Nord returning home from Cyrodil after her mother finally passed joining her father in the afterlife, Hjördís taking the Pale Pass to a better opportunity.  Her father had been a blacksmith, but he had possessed a wanderlust when younger, along with a romantic streak his family had not approved of. No Nord boy of theirs would marry a Breton girl and her mother's parents had been disappointed that she hadn't chosen someone more cultured, someone with magic. And so they had moved to Cyrodil, Hjördís born months after they arrived.  
  
Hjördís takes her colouring from her mother, dark hair, more tanned than her fair father who burned in the sun but she had his height, towering over her mother. She had his eyes too, the grey of the sky before a storm.  
  
“Reminds me of where I grew up,” he said, “always grey there unless it was white with the storms rolling in, thick snowstorms that could bury a man.” Her father made it sound so beautiful, this untamed wilderness. It wasn't always easy, he was no Stormcloak but he was a staunch Nord who liked to tell old tales and her mother told her of the Forsworn, of how her people had been forced from their homes. There was always that bone of contention in their home with their traditions but that was Skyrim, she would learn when she finally made it there. Her father's last words before the cough had finally claimed him had been of his home, wheezing out about his childhood. Her mother too, unable to use her magic to stop herself from coughing either, not from the same illness that had claimed her father, his had been from working the forge for years and the mines too when he'd been younger. Her mother had been something else, the damp got in, her joints ached. She'd passed away telling stories of the Forsworn, wishing that her daughter had had more, that the babies she had lost had been there so that it would not all have fallen to Hjördís to look after her parents in their illness. She is still a fine smith – part of why she left for Skyrim, to look for a job, for a fresh start and she had to sell her father's forge when she couldn't afford to run it and buy supplies for it. In the end she'd had to pick ingredients to make them potions, salves and tonics, she couldn't afford the apothecary and so she sat by the fire, learned how to hunt better and sent her parents off to the afterlife one after the other before scraping together what little she could.  
  
“You picked a bad time to return home,” the Imperial had told her when she had been led off the cart alongside Stormcloaks. Some of them might have been her family, she didn't know, she would never know now as she took her place. At least she would die where she had been made, in Skyrim, a daughter of the Reach and of Windhelm, Helgen's dirt beneath the knees of her ragged prison tunic, everything else taken from her, the last few things that belonged to her family. Better she dies here.  
  
But Talos smiles upon her. Or any other of the Gods her father raised her with – she's not fool enough to ever believe a Hargraven would do anything other than rip her throat out. The dragon, the thing of legends blackens the sky, screaming and belching flame and ruin and one of her companions from the prison cart reaches for her, shouting. A new beginning, one she will look back upon with a smile with all her different names and titles when she is Ysmir, Dragon of the North. She fights her own blood, she fights Forsworn and she dons the Stormcloak cuirass but this is her beginning, not theirs, a new life free of ghosts. She makes mistakes but finally she will know herself, know her strengths and weaknesses, the dovahkiin and so much more standing against everything that will oppose her.   
  
She is the Dragonborn. She is a true daughter of Skyrim at last.


End file.
